Life for Dummies
(On One Page)

by Douglas Milburn

You can get life down to two choices:
                         1. Say no.
                         2. Say yes.

Everything else is embroidery.

For example, there's "say maybe," which is basically a coward's variant on "say no."

And there's "say nothing." Well, you can't. Not really. You can try, and then convince yourself that you are saying nothing. But even saying nothing is saying something.

Then there's saying "What the fuck!?", a popular and easy choice and which is actually closer to saying nothing than saying nothing.

Naturally, there are big yes's (Sophocles, Mozart) and little yes's (a quarter to the homeless). Just as there are big no's (war, greed) and little no's (most TV). But all yes's are yes's, and all no's are no's.

At times, yes can be so easy (the examples are obvious); at other times, so hard (grief, pain). Given the nature of this existence, no is rarely hard and generally quite easy. Eventually most humans settled into a largely unexamined maybe-tending-toward-no, leavened perhaps by weekly, mindless rituals of yes.

The problem for those who try to say anything other than yes is that we are built, from the DNA up, as yes-sayers (it's called the survival instinct). The breath you just took? It said yes. As will the next one.

The no-sayers, in their infinite variety, thus construct their world of denial on a yes-saying foundation without which their air castle couldn't stand.

There's also the problem of habit. It's easy to get into a no-saying rut, and once there, it can be pretty hard to get out. The rut is comfortable (sort of) and familiar, and the momentum of no-saying habit can carry you right on to, well, your very last yes-saying breath.

This could all be expanded to several cleverly written books, a TV series, a much-visited web site etc. Why bother? I've given you the basics, which is really all you need. The rest is worth doodly-squat if you don't figure it out for yourself.

One tip: A no-sayer will always win an argument about the correctness of no-saying. Because it is a position based on observed-if superficial-reality ("All is shit"). Yes-saying, being based on the non-verbal bedrock of this reality, is a position that cannot be successfully argued. A problem and a danger here is that yes-saying can easily be confused with "faith", a mistake that leads to the many confusions of organized religion.

END

Copyright Douglas Milburn © 2006

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